All right, played it for a bit, and ... Well, it seems to a success! The game really nails all the important aspects of HL1 - gunplay, level-design, puzzles (it adds a few of it's own,) and I'll repeat what Wishbone said: I'm very impressed. So far I got into the silo, and what I've seen is really, really fantastic. It's pretty much a polished version of HL1 with modern graphics and design approach. Which is great.

Is this something you can play without Steam installed on your system?

I don't think so, since you need to have the Source SDK installed. I don't think you can do that outside of Steam.

No, it needs the Source SDK which requires Steam.

Edit: ninja'd

That's too bad. Thanks!

Just "played" the intro scene. Looks fucking gorgeous compared to the original. It that keeps up I am going to love it.

Fixed that up and now it runs at 120FPS+ most of the time :D

How do you run the game actually?
It may be a silly question but I only managed it to run after installing it 3rd time after I finally downloaded source skd 2007. The thing is I have BM installed at a different location than suggested and I know you can run it my opening source SDK with additional commands.
As for the gameplay it is pretty much what you had in HL so it's good ;]
There is a few bugs and the game can crash (actually it is the sole reason why I stopped playing it a moment ago). If you played HL you gotta check it out and if you didn't, you really need to check it out.

If you used the executable installer, the game should show up in your Steam library (if you had Steam running while it was installing you'll need to close it, then re-open it).

If you extracted the .7z somewhere... someone else might know how to getting running.

I'll download this later this weekend, maybe when servers are less busy.

I never played HL (eek!), so unless people object I'll go through Black Mesa to get the experience.

If you download it using the torrent you probably won't have any speed issues :)

I read somewhere that torrent downloads were also going slowly due to high traffic. I can wait a couple days. :)

Black Mesa: Source seem to generally improve upon HL, unless you're a purist. However, it's missing the last chapter of the story, that's supposed to be released at some ... other point.

Seems great from what I've played so far. Faithful in every way I'd have wanted. Improved in every way I could have hoped. Apart from a clipping glitch or two it's pretty faultless and beyond what I was expecting.

I have been pretty critical of the project in the past and I am happy to admit that I was wrong.

Yeah, whoever said that doesn't understand torrents at all.